Nine months before Donald Trump was voted in as US president for the first time in 2016, he was asked at a campaign rally about a large golf course he purchased on a picturesque sliver of Ireland’s Atlantic coast. "We spent a lot of money on making it just perfecto and now it’s doing great. But I don’t care about that stuff anymore.
It is like small potatoes,” he said. His interest in the site appears to have suddenly been rekindled. This weekend, protesters will turn out at the course in Doonbeg, Co Clare and across Ireland as he makes his first visit to the island as US president since 2019.
Some 4,000 Irish and American security personnel are expected to be deployed over the two-day visit, which begins on Saturday, at a reported cost to the taxpayer of €20 million (£17.16m). Mr Trump is due to meet Taoiseach Micheál Martin and president Catherine Connolly at Phoenix Park, which has been closed since Thursday for the occasion, before flying to Shannon tomorrow afternoon. From there, he will go on to the tiny village of Doonbeg to see the end of the Irish Open at his own Mr Trump-stamped resort before departing on Sunday evening.
Opposition to the Mr Trump administration is broad across Ireland and a recent poll by the Sunday Independent and Ireland Thinks found as much as 69 per cent of the public do not support the visit. A coalition of political organisations, advocacy groups and individuals are now planning to turn out for protests over the weekend in Dublin and Doonbeg with a clear message that the president is not welcome. Sarah Clancy, a community worker from Clare, said they have “never had so much reason to protest” as now, citing what she termed Mr Trump’s support for Israel in Gaza, the “pointless” war with Iran and resulting spike in energy costs, and the “overall coarseness and crassness” of the US president.
And overall in Ireland we are not those things,” she said. But the people at large, that is not the image that Irish people have of ourselves, of people who live here ... So there is much more readiness, I think, to name Mr Trump as a tyrannical authoritarian fascist crazy person.” Ms Clancy told The Independent that people had been preparing for this weekend’s protests for a long time, and that they would be regarded in left-wing liberal circles as something “that you don’t want to miss”.
Journalist and author Justine McCarthy told The Independent she would be heading to Doonbeg to join the demonstrations to signal that “we don’t want him here”. Because the trial was in civil court rather than criminal, he was not registered as a sex offender. Ms McCarthy said she did not care whether Mr Trump sees their protests as he would likely ignore it anyway.
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